Does British totalitarianism have to be quite so…British?
Author Alan Moore is purportedly none too pleased with the Wachowski brothers' dead-weight adaptation of his work-to the point of having his name removed from the closing credits. And it's not a
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stretch to see why: In addition to its Keanu-worthy script ("imbecilic," après Moore), the movie shoots itself in the foot with such astonishing regularity it almost seems deliberate. Every time the plot moves optimistically in the direction of dramatic tension, pontification is thrown in its path; every opportunity to build character instead fills its own space with banal styrofoam dialogue, every opening for genuine insight, revelation and enlightenment instead contains…exactly nothing.
Part of the problem could be the fact that its title character, the avenging V, wears a Guy Fawkes mask for the entirety of the movie (with a swishy little black-bobbed wig). Hugo Weaving plays V, for all the good it does you to know this; the seductive, muffled voice emerging from behind the façade is Standard British Alpha-Male, located somewhere along the spectrum from Obi-Wan to Voldemort. With so little to go on, we're thrown onto Natalie Portman for our human interface (and Stephen Rea, who's wonderful as a world-weary police inspector with a defeated visage that's half Paul Wolfowitz, half unmade bed).
Cue sets of futuristic London; when Evey (Portman) goes out after curfew one evening, she's accosted by leering men-no mere rapists, these, but "Fingermen," the fresh new face of the Thought Police in the now-totalitarian UK. Backstory: In the wake of bioterrorism, right-wing-and-then-some party Norsefire, who make the BNP look like particularly indolent hippies, ran away with Parliamentary elections and
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hey presto-fascist regime! Cue truncheon-wielding, jackboot-wearing thugs, along with sadistic medical researchers and an even more compliant than usual British populace-and you can begin to see why V dolls himself up like Prince Valiant to commit random acts of violence on Guy Fawkes' Day (nowadays only tenuously connected to gunpowder, treason and plot and instead having a good deal more to do with fireworks, candy floss and those glow-in-the-dark plastic necklaces). V takes time out from his busy schedule of sedition to rescue Evey from the Fingermen and treat her to a front-row view of his latest project, an unauthorized demolition of the Old Bailey. (Cue shot of golden Justice shattering into teensy-weensy pieces; that's irony, that is.) When Evey in turn helps V escape after some larking about with Semtex, a wary alliance is born; but will she assist with V's next performance piece-blowing up the Houses of Parliament?
By the time
V for Vendetta
rolls around to its money shot (cue Big Ben's dial exploding outward and flaming chunks of stonemasonry falling into the Thames), it's hard to muster more than a dispirited well-it's-about-bloody-time-then. With the best of intentions, the movie systematically has managed to destroy our interest in its otherwise interesting subjects: the evils of religious intolerance and homophobia, the rise of the political right in times of crisis, and the timeless story of a mentor/protégé relationship turning romantic, with a young woman falling for an older man whose expression she literally can't read (that's a metaphor, that is). Some truly maudlin dialogue is to blame, as is Portman's wide-eyed earnestness-but the fact that the hero is forcibly rendered wooden doesn't help
V for Vendetta
achieve entertainment escape velocity.
